


Dimensional Analysis

by KnightOfTheGrey



Category: Eberron, Forgotten Realms, The Gods Are Bastards - D. D. Webb
Genre: Crossover, Drow, Fish out of Water, High Fantasy, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:40:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28448568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KnightOfTheGrey/pseuds/KnightOfTheGrey
Comments: 5
Kudos: 2





	1. Don't Shoot the Glowy Artifact of Ancient Power and Mysterious Function

*** _Ka'sara_ ***

"You done standing around gawking?"

I wasn't, in point of fact. We were standing in a lab where the _Creators_ had worked magics beyond our meagre means, built devices of which we could only dream, here to start digging through what they knew. I wanted to savour the awe for a moment. “Sorry, boss, give me a second.”

The room was shaped rather than built, seamlessly smooth walls rising a good twenty feet in the air. What remained of the furniture was proportioned for a Creator, too, the worktops were a good six inches taller than me. Some of my more eager colleagues had gotten a head start; in another context the scene might have looked almost comical. Five-and-a-bit-foot drow dressed practically for fieldwork clambering up small folding ladders to examine the detritus on the countertops. Like children playing with their parents’ toys. I closed my eyes and took a whiff of the air, dust and sulfur, and the faint hint of ozone that often came with the preservation enchantments the ancients laid on their structures to keep the contents clean and fresh. Five thousand years, probably, since anyone had done any work in this space, and their tools were ready to be picked up and used tomorrow.

“ _Now_ , Ka’sara.”

I opened my eyes to find my boss glaring at me. Fifteen years ago in a fit of adolescent pique I’d dyed streaks of fire-orange into my hair in emulation of the Creators, and to Professor Tor’xen that was the height of disrespect. He’d never quite forgiven me. Though to be fair I’d never gotten around to changing my hair back. I shot him a sheepish grin, which accomplished nothing, and started forward into the lab, asking “Where do you need me?”

“Far left.” He pointed. “We’ve pulled a construct out of a containment box over there, it seems pretty intact. See what you can do with it.” Fantastic! Tor’xen started to say something else, but seemed to change his mind as I trotted over that direction. I thought I caught a hint of smile out of the corner of my eye. Could have been a figment of my imagination, but I’m an optimist. Or try to be.

I clambered up onto the counter behind two of my other colleagues. They’d got the containment box open and were poking at the contents; one looked back and asked “Got your head out of the clouds and deigned to join us mere researchers, then?” Shit. I couldn’t remember his name. I’d hate to prove him completely correct almost immediately like that. Ah. Own it.

“Sorry, what was that?” I replied, brightly. “The air’s so thin up here!” That at least earned me a laugh before I elbowed him aside to get into the box. The construct inside was built of woody fibres and steel plating. From dissecting other remnants I’d found I knew it’d have tremendously complicated spellwork on its bones and the inside of its ‘skin’, in a language we hadn’t identified or decoded. We often found damaged ones in Creator sites but this was the most intact I’d ever seen, and the containment box presented another interesting question. Unlike the construct stored inside it was obviously Creator work, covered in an elaborately-written matrix of spells set up to keep the contents inert. Did they expect this thing to _wake up_ suddenly? I turned to one of the other researchers next to me; she was watching as I poked and prodded. “Hey, Vax, could you get me my toolkit?”

“I’m just a porter now?” She grumbled, but went. I mentally gave myself a quick clap, I’d gotten a name right! The construct was heavy (as one might expect, built of metal and wood like that). I doubted I could lift it unaided, but placed lying in the box as it was I had good access to everything important. The ones we’d found wrecked in the past were pretty thoroughly mangled. Whatever animated them must be resistant to limb trauma if they were only brought down by head or torso damage. I poked around the breastplate. It was made up of four major panels, two where the pectoral muscles would be on the standard pattern body, the anchor plate that connected to the shoulder structures, plus one on each side where the pectorals would be on a standard pattern body and a smaller panel extending down from the main one a bit, leaving a mass of fibre for a belly between it and the gut. I’d seen bits of a lot of this, but the small round structure in between the pectoral plates was new to me. I gave it a tentative poke, then jumped back as it slid soundlessly apart in two halves, exposing a cylindrical slot. Vax jumped, she’d gotten back with my tools and I hadn’t noticed. “Thanks, Vax. Tell me what you make of this.”

She frowned at the hole in the thing’s chest. “It looks like something’s meant to plug in there. That spot’s often the most destroyed on the damaged ones we’ve found, maybe that’s where the motive force comes from?”

I shook my head. “A thought, certainly, but if that was it would they need to contain it like this? Either there’s something else going on, or the Creators didn’t know for sure how these things worked.” I extricated a chisel from my toolkit and probed the edges of the pectoral plating, gently. Riveted to the plates below. Hrm. I looked up to find Vax silently proffering my bolt cutters. “Thanks.” I started to remove the plate, Vax worked around me clearing scraps of rivet. “If you’re going to build a construct like this there’s no reason to make it look like the standard pattern body, is there? Unless it’s supposed to be emotionally relatable to other standard-pattern life somehow…”

“Or if it’s going to be remote-piloted somehow by a mind that’s used to using the standard pattern body.”

“That’s a thought.” We finished with the pectoral plate, Vax laid it off to the side. At the bottom of the slot in the middle of the torso was a milky-white oblong crystal nested into its own slot connected directly to the skeletal ribcage below the plating. I frowned, grabbed a magnifier from my toolkit, gave it a closer look, and almost fell backward off the counter.

The thing was _filled_ with spellwork. Layers upon layers of writing were etched deep into the crystal, all so tiny I could barely make out individual letters, wrapped in an elaborate and impossibly complex spiralling pattern through the heart of the thing. “This,” I breathed, “this is the stuff of _breakthroughs_ we’ve got here.” Vax looked at me like I’d gone off the deep end, so I passed her the stone and the magnifier, and soon she was staring at it like she half expected it to explode. She handed it back wordlessly and I stuffed it into a containment bag enchanted to nullify stray magic, then slipped it into a pocket. “I’ve got to show Tor’xen this, he’ll be _furious_.” We shared the kind of grin that only exists between fellow servants of an overbearing master, reveling in dishing out a moment’s comeuppance. I stood to head back to the ladder, and then someone near the center of the room shouted “ASSEMBLE! WEAPONS!” at the top of his voice.

Frantic scrambling ensued. There were around thirty of us on the expedition, maybe five or seven of those were trained soldiers, but Tor’xen had insisted on drilling all of us in a few emergency scenarios to make sure the porters and academics didn’t panic and scatter immediately. I’d hopped down to the floor and started trotting for the center of the room almost before I registered the command. The expedition had gathered in a circle with guards to the outside. They made an eclectic grouping in mixed armour with a wide variety of blades and wands, but the alert expressions were pretty uniform. Vax and I slipped into the circle, she drew a wand and faced out, I pushed to the center.

Tor’xen was leaning on his staff questioning one of the porters; the kid had a blank look in his eyes, and was stammering. And having the leader of the expedition snarling in his face wasn’t helping. “...what did you see, boy? Animals? Lizardfolk?” The porter shook his head soundlessly, his mouth worked a few times, nothing came out. I turned and grabbed a waterskin from off a nearby crate, pushed it into his hands. He looked at it for a moment like he wasn’t quite sure what it was before taking a drink.

“N-no, sir, I didn’t see what did it at all, just the b-blood...their throats…” He squeezed his eyes closed. “Their throats were cut, sir, just the once, like they’d never seen it coming.”

Tor’xen snarled, hands clenched around his staff like it was a throat. His eyes met mine briefly. We both knew what was coming. “ _Qualitar_.” He raised his voice. “Wraiths! Stay together, eyes in all directions!”

A moment of silence. We waited, tense. It stretched long enough for me to start wondering, if I were a wraith on a quest to punish explorers with the temerity to mess around in ancient ruins would I alert them before attacking, or would I wait until they decided I wasn’t coming, then pick off a few more? That cheery thought was almost immediately pre-empted by a rapid spike in tension to my magical senses, then it went dark. Drow have excellent night vision, we can see by starlight almost as well as by sunlight, and it’s rumoured that our subterranean cousins can see perfectly with no light at all, but the wraiths make shadows woven of smoke and illusion that can dampen the senses of just about anything. The room immediately descended into chaos. I tried to duck, grabbing my knife and wand, ran into someone, totally lost my sense of direction, slipped on what I hoped was water, pulled on my magic and slapped aside a couple of stray wandshots before they could hit me, tripped, got to my feet again, and then something hit me hard on both wrists and grabbed me from behind while I was busy dropping my weapons. The darkness wisped away into nothingness; it usually lasts thirty seconds or so, but that felt like _hours_.

I grabbed at the arm holding me, the wraith behind me was bigger and stronger than me, and I couldn’t get purchase on the serpent-hide of the sleeve, but then the arm loosened a bit and I gulped down some air. The scene in front of me was a horrible mess. Twenty of our party were down, some still moving, some not, along with two bodies in mottled grey-green serpent-hide, which did give me a moment of grotesque satisfaction. Tor’xen was still up and several others were holding wands on me. Probably on the wraith using me as a shield, really, but staring down the wands the difference starts to look pretty much academic. The walls were scorched with wandfire, priceless artifacts had been utterly destroyed, and there was a faint whine somewhere at the edge of my hearing. My eyes settled on the dimensional anchor in the corner, the Creators often sealed their labs from the boundary ethereal to make sure nobody could teleport in or out with those, and it had clearly been hit by something. The wire lattice was torn, the crystalline core was cracked and leaking light, and the whole structure was spinning lazily in defiance of its usual static floatation above the base. Shit. I tried to clear my throat, but my captor started speaking next to my ear.

” _Defilers_.” He spat the word more than said it, I tried surreptitiously to lean my head away from where he was talking. “Faithful dogs, the Sul’at’ar, whose loyalty has never wavered, come to pick clean the bones of the masters.”

”Um…” I tried again, before Tor’xen cut me off. “Your compatriots are dead, Qualitar, and you’re badly outnumbered. I suggest you release my colleague and go running home for help.” He lowered his head to glare from under his bushy white brows, and fiery light started to trace the runes of his staff. “If you kill her there’s no way you’re getting out of this room alive.” Theatrical bastard.

”Guys…” There was one way the wraith might be planning to get out alive, and I didn’t fancy either of our chances if he tried it. The noise from the cracked anchor was slowly building. The wraith tightened his grip around me and I had to stop. “You may escape justice this day, defiler, but we will be watching for you.” I heard a smile come into his voice then. “Perhaps the elders will allow this one to be punished on your behalf!”

Three things happened then in close succession. Tor’xen’s hand whipped out, sending a thin tongue of flame at the wraith like a whip. The wraith dragged me along into a shunt, likely planning on ending on the surface outside the lab. And the dimensional anchor exploded into a howl of noise and loose magic. The grip on me disappeared abruptly, and for a moment my mind rebelled at what I saw. Fragmentary notes from the ancients about the few who managed to visit the outer plane of Xoriat tell of a vast number of alternate landscapes existing in the same space simultaneously, where the observer is forced to process and comprehend the stimuli from an unknown number of contradictory dimensions they can interact with and an unknown number of others they can perceive but not affect. In that fractional moment I was in a far worse place than Xoriat, I was _everywhere_ at once, perceiving billions upon billions of contradictory realities, vast swathes of information and sensation flowing past me, unable to pick any detail out of it even if I’d had the presence of mind to try. In less than a second my mind started to shut down to try and protect itself from the madness, and I slipped into comfortable empty blackness.

***

_Somewhere entirely different a humming resonance built in a cobbled-together arcane construct. The web of spellwork scrawled across a dozen different materials connecting a hundred different objects shivered, jumped, and started to shift out of alignment. A man with alabaster skin and leathery wings dressed only in a pair of tight trousers jumped to correct, muttering “no!” at a rapid pace, frantically shifting and re-connecting wires as a high-pitched whine built at the edge of hearing._

***

I’ve never been much of a drinker, so the experience of waking up in unfamiliar surroundings with a pounding headache wasn’t one I was particularly familiar with. I thought I might lie there for a bit longer, let my head get its feet under it and perhaps stop spinning, maybe give Tor’xen a chance to clean up the mess himself for a change. It was oddly quiet, somehow. I wasn’t entirely sure what noise to expect. Then I thought I might try opening my eyes, saw an oddly familiar grey-green lump, took a moment to place it, panicked, tried to scramble to my feet, and checked about my person in search of a weapon as I got as far away from the wraith as I could before he groaned and I froze again.

He’d maintained a grip on at least one of those vicious-looking knives, and hadn’t managed to fall down on it. I’d managed to get halfway up and was scrabbling around the back of my head trying to call up a spell (which only made my headache worse) by the time the wraith had rolled smoothly to his feet and started shouting. “You _lunatic_! We’re lucky you didn’t kill us both, playing around with magic you don’t understand…”

I tried to roar back. I think I may have managed a shriek. “ _Me_? I’m not the one who tried to teleport in the middle of unstable dimensional resonance, you half-witted thug…” We both cut off and glared at each other for a long moment.

Finally he snarled something under his breath, sheathed the knife, and turned his icy blue glare on our surroundings. The rest of the expedition and the lab weren’t where I’d left them, we were standing in a long tunnel that gave every sign of having been bored through solid dark-grey stone. The wraith had his back to me, now, and was prodding the wall of the tunnel with a fingertip. “Any idea where we are?” I bristled a bit at being so completely dismissed as a physical threat, but elected to do so silently.

”You’re the survivalist here, you tell me.”

He overlooked my tone, prodding at the wall gently again. “This is basalt, like the site from before, but the tunnel’s bored through a solid formation rather than built of quarried stone dragged in from elsewhere. There shouldn’t be anything like this for a hundred, hundred-fifty miles.” He looked over his shoulder, frowning. “Something about the composition’s off. I can’t place it. Does your magic feel odd to you?”

It took me a moment to twig to the change of subject, then I frowned and focused inward. Magic comes in three major forms, the arcane, the divine, and the psionic, and all three require strong connection to perceive the background field casters draw power from. Sometimes the magically-attuned can sense one of the others in a particularly strong manifest zone, but here there were _four_. I leaned against the wall, closed my eyes, and listened to the off-pitch resonance of the arcane, an unfamiliar tinge of blue filtering into my mind’s eye. I frowned, looked up. “Something’s definitely different. Give me a moment.” I pulled in some energy, it came. Good, that still worked. I tried poking it together into a simple release of light, it went happily, though what should have been a spark of white light was tinged blue. Curious. Then I formed a probe and sent it out looking for the beacons. Nothing. Teleportation over long distances is frequently inaccurate and always power-inefficient, the Sulatar set up teleportation beacons in our cities long ago so that lost wizards might always be able to find a way home. Except now. I tried prodding the planar boundary, and couldn’t penetrate into the border ethereal at all. “Dimensional resonances suggest we’re still on the material plane, but I can’t sense the border ethereal or the astral from this location at all. Effects are consistent with a pocket dimension, or we could be on a different material plane with different dimensional boundaries. Or both.” Cheery thought. I frowned, considering. Magic wouldn’t work the same here, but I wasn’t sure what the dimensional boundary might do. “Try a shunt?”

I looked up after a moment to see the Qualitar raising one arched white eyebrow at me. He really did have the most irritating face, I made a note to try punching it if I could separate him from his weapons. “Please.” I clasped my hands in an elaborate show of supplication, he snorted and disappeared. I frowned. The wraith’s shunt was supposed to be nearly instantaneous, either he’d suddenly decided to leave me alone or something was very wrong. I gave it a minute, and was about to start probing the dimensional boundary again when he reappeared, frowning.

”That’s definitely different.” He blinked a few times like he was trying to clear his vision, stared off into space for a moment. “The shunt hopped me into the border ethereal and left me there, I didn’t move in space at all. Had to modify the technique slightly to get back, it took me a few tries.” He frowned at me like he’d just remembered I was there. “Do you have a name, defiler?”

”Ka’sara Nethayme.” Research assistant first class, dimensional engineering specialist, of the Tel’Esk Archaeological Institute in Ashvale, if it matters. Which it didn’t. Degrees tend to not carry much weight in pocket dimensions only reachable via bizarre magical accident.

”Well, Ka’sara Nethayme, I am Serrax of the Khelurat.” He paused. I returned a blank look, the tribes of the Qualitar are many and varied. He gave no sign of stopping to clarify. “I’m not sure how much you know about Qualitar jurisprudence, but the Scorpion Wraiths have broad prosecutorial discretion over crimes committed by trespassers in our territory.” The wide and friendly smile that followed utterly failed to touch his eyes. It put me in mind of the white shark I’d seen on a visit to the Iceflow Sea once as a girl. “If you’re prepared to offer your parole and cooperate with me while we’re on whatever plane we’re on right now I shall delay passing judgement on your actions, and I can promise your assistance getting home will be taken into account when the time comes to do so. What do you say?”

”Maybe I decide I like it here.” I crossed my arms and gave the wraith the flattest look I could manage.

”Then, I’m afraid, I shall be forced to execute…” I winced “...your sentence now, and make my own way home.” He paused. Somehow he looked much happier at the prospect of murdering me in a tunnel. Lovely people, the Qualitar. “I’m sorry, should I have said _carry out_ your sentence?”

I snarled. “Fine.” I tried to stalk off. I couldn’t hear him moving, but the smirking presence following just to my left made itself felt.


	2. If You Go Digging For Drow You Can't Complain When You Find Some

*** _Arunae_ ***

The Knights in Silver are one of the most terrifying fighting forces in the world. Not because of their weapons, or their magic, or their skills in battle, no, but because of their _organization_. A ragtag assembly of soldiers and scouts, most trying not to yawn, stood in front of a small cave in a hilly spur of the Nether Mountains; five hours before most of us had been in bed when a routine divinatory check for local threats had turned up signs the mage on duty had interpreted as “drow”. A less disciplined force might have figured that it was a fluke, the Underdark below us was as sparse as it came, and there were no major drow cities for five hundred miles, but the mage on duty followed procedure. He set up a couple more checks to narrow down the location, pinpointed a chunk of random hillside miles from anywhere, and passed the information on to Captain Ferrax. The Captain assembled a small scouting team, then decided what he really needed was a battle mage, and further I might be just the right woman for his posse, so I got to be woken up too. Then we assembled a tunnel-fighting arsenal and broke open the Spellguard’s stock of darkvision potions, were bundled into saddles (with the usual accompanying threats to tie us down if we couldn’t seat our horses ourselves, I never took to the horrible beasts with their snorting and their kicking), dragged off into the middle of nowhere, and set to stumbling around the hillsides until Guardsman Maurin fell into a hole that proved unexpectedly deep.

Then, obviously, the thing we needed most to wake us all up and get us moving was to be lined up in ranks and _shouted_ at. Soldiers.

“We don’t know whether this is an undiscovered hole that goes down into the deep dark, or just some nasty dark stinkhole, and we don’t care! We’re going to go down there, map it, and see how deep it goes!” Captain Ferrax was a mountain dwarf, and a particularly big one, easily topping five feet and built like an ox, with lungs to match. “Some of you have never been down a hole like this before!” Everyone studiously ignored me. I suppressed a sigh. Grow up in Silverymoon, dedicate your life to its defense, and still the slate-grey complexion and ash-blonde hair gives people _notions_. The people of Silverymoon are very polite. No matter how much they think I want to live in a hole, or eat bugs and mushrooms, or pull out whips and chains in the bedroom, they’ll never say anything. “First thing to remember, the Underdark is loaded with things that want to _eat_ you! Eye tyrants, mind flayers, hook horrors, draghazar…” (I may have never lived in the Underdark but I was pretty sure he’d made that one up) “...goblins, drider, umber hulks, _demons_ , and the biggest spiders you’ve ever seen! That means _stick together_ , and it means _don’t go touching things unless you know exactly what they are_!”

The first glimmer of sunrise didn’t glint off the Captain’s helm; the scouting party was wearing leathers for silence and speed, but his concession to stealth was to switch to heavy plate in matte grey with muffled joints. The sudden mental image of the Captain as a turtle so bonded with his shell he couldn’t crawl out struck me, and I tried not to giggle. He shot me an eloquent look; the Spellguard were nominally civilian experts so he couldn’t chew me out in formation, but the look promised several pointed comments about military decorum in my future. “Second!” He tapped the satchel of darkvision potions. “We’re not carrying lights about down there, this is a scouting mission! The goal is to ensure we identify any potential threats, and that we don’t alert anyone to the fact that this is a route to the surface if they don’t know already!” I thought about muttering ‘assuming they can’t just follow the shouting’, and decided not to. “This stuff will let you see like a dwarf for about eight hours. You’ll be able to see in total absence of light, in greyscale only, out to a distance of sixty to eighty feet. It doesn’t work miracles, so your vision’s still going to be blocked by magical darkness or normal visibility blocks like smoke.” He looked us over, glowering. “Sergeant Bengoson!” The dwarf on the right of the first rank saluted. “Your rank will be team one.” He collected five potions for his troops (none for himself, obviously), while the Captain made Corporal Tarrin’s rank ‘team two’ and detailed Corporal Vonnidal’s rank to stay behind and guard the tunnel mouth.

“Arunae of the Spellguard!” I tried the salute. From the Captain’s expression I didn’t think I quite pulled it off. “Your specialization’s mage-killing, yes?”

“Counterspells and spellbreaking, yes, sir.”

“Good. Stick with me, don’t hesitate to speak up if there are magical concerns you feel I need to know about.”

And so six humans and four elves chugged their darkvision potions in unison, didn’t quite manage to grimace at the taste in unison, and then they, three dwarves, and me all filed down into a hole in the ground in search of the horrors of the Underdark.

The first thing you notice traveling deep into the ground is the sound. Even in quiet places up on the surface, even miles from any sign of human activity, wind or water or animals will make their presence known. Especially with elven hearing there’s nowhere _truly_ quiet until you make your way underground. Add in the hard surfaces and the narrow tunnels, and even slight noises can echo for miles; predators often hunt by sound, and everyone is careful to make as little noise as possible. Sign language and telepathic communication are ubiquitous among organized civilizations, soft-soled shoes dominate, and armour is flexible and well-muffled. 

If you’re magically-inclined the next thing you’ll notice is the _faerzress_ (or sometimes _z’ress’faer_ in older texts); the term is Drow in origin, and roughly translates to “dominant magic”. Whatever you call it the effect is fairly constant: roughly a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet below the surface a background energy field pervades the air and the ground. Its most obvious effect is to fog magical connection in a way that renders divination unpredictable and teleportation impractically risky, but theorists love to use it to explain seemingly inexplicable things about Underdark ecology. We do know that the drow seek out areas in which the _faerzress_ is stronger to build their cities. Whether that’s superstition or they know something we don’t, I can’t say. The presence of the _faerzress_ is, however, almost universally considered the boundary between underground and Underdark. I tapped the Captain on a pauldron, softly (I’d never worked out how he felt slight touches through all the steel and quilting), and signed to him that we’d crossed the boundary. He acknowledged silently with a grim look, tapped his gauntlets together to make a noise, and gave a signal to the rest of the team. Hope that this was a displacer hunt faded. Whatever we found this tunnel would need to be closed up or garrisoned when we returned.

The third thing (or the second, for those that can’t sense magic) you’ll usually notice is temperature. Rocks don’t gain or lose heat as fast as dirt or air does, so as you descend first the temperature will normalize towards the average temperature on the surface, then it’ll start to heat up. Underdark civilizations tend to be clustered roughly half a mile to two miles below the surface, where it’s warm enough for a sophisticated ecosystem of fungi and cave creatures to feed them, but above where it starts to get too hot for humanoid life. We weren’t that deep, maybe three or four hundred feet down, but it was definitely hot enough that the soldiers were noticing. Brows were wiped more frequently, and I saw a hand or two stray to a collar, before the owner thought better of adjusting their uniform for comfort where Captain Ferrax might see them do it.

And then, suddenly, I caught a hint of noise. I held my hand up, the universal sign for “stop”, and with a bit of rustling and jostling the scouting party came to a stop. I closed my eyes and listened. I may not live in a hole or eat bugs and mushrooms, but I had my father’s ears and with those and some practice it’s surprising how much information you can collect. The pulsing beat of echoes out of sync with each other, the volume of a footfall, slight changes in how much sound gets to one ear over another. I’m no owl, but it’s pretty hard to sneak up on me in a dark tunnel. I lowered my head to the Captain’s ear and started to whisper, quickly. “Drow ahead. At least thirty, can’t hear any mounts. They’re moving fast and don’t care if they’re overheard. Maybe ten minutes to contact. No sign they know we’re here.” If they did, they’d be moving much more slowly. And much more quietly.

The Captain started to gesture frantically. We backtracked up the tunnel fifty feet or so to a narrow spot, a good one, where the ceiling came down a bit as well. Three soldiers could park there in formation and hold for a long time. Team One did just that, three in front with shields, three behind with pikes ready to grab, leaving a bit of space in the middle. The Captain had an intense whispered conversation with two soldiers (I caught some of it, but I respect their privacy) and they scrambled back up the tunnel the way we’d come as fast as they could. The _faerzress_ makes magical communication almost impossible, runners would get to the surface and sound warning even if we died down here.

The next eight minutes were perhaps the tensest of any of our lives, standing there in total silence and sweltering heat waiting for death and horrors to come marching up the hall without a care in the world. I gauged the distance, guessed we had about fifty feet of clear visibility ahead. More than close enough for a wizard to pop around the corner and throw something nasty into the middle of our little shieldwall. I focused on my counter-formulae. The noise of feet and the occasional whisper found their way to my ears. They were still getting closer.

Then they abruptly stopped getting closer. The first two drow over the crest at the end of our killing field were met with crossbow bolts, which produced shouts of alarm, rather a large amount of blood, and some hasty return shots that didn’t accomplish much. They pulled the corpses down the other side quickly. Standard practice in narrow spaces like this. Trying to rush a well-placed enemy is harder with the trip hazard. Shields came out next, four in a cluster slowly coming over the rise. Someone behind them sent a cluster of magic missiles towards us, the faint glow sending a sudden splash of colour whizzing down the tunnel before I smacked them aside with a twist of energy. I let myself sneer. The weaving behind the missiles was hesitant, amateurish. Barely worthy of an apprentice.

They backed up again. A few crossbow bolts from our side clattered off the drow shields, a few of theirs bounced off ours. I frowned. Drow prefer to avoid frontal assaults into blocked tunnels because they’re not idiots, but they wouldn’t be wandering around looking for a way to the surface without more ordnance, or competent spellcasters. They had to have some way of breaking through a line like ours, and we hadn’t seen it yet, which made me nervous. The Captain took a look through the shields, snarled. He must have figured we’d been waiting too long since the next thing he whispered was “Prepare to receive!”, and then the screaming started.

The scream of a vrock is almost indescribable. I can tell you that it’s loud, shrill, and feels like a spike is being driven into your ears, but words on a page can’t make you feel a sound so horrible, so all-encompassing, that it dulls all other sensation and you’re trapped rattling around inside your own head with nothing but the scream for company. They can’t keep it up for very long, but it’ll send most shield-walls over like bowling pins, at which point you’re out of formation and have an eight-foot lanky horror covered in coal-black feathers in among you tearing with beak and claws.

The one that came storming into the midst of our position was a little taller than vrocks I’d seen before, and a little greyer. Two scouts went down while I was still trying to get back to my feet, and then the demon leapt on the Captain in a whirl of limbs and feathers. It was over almost faster than I could see. By the time I had a spell ready the dwarf was bleeding out through gaping rents in his armour, while the demon had been neatly bisected and was too busy slowly collapsing into ash to be of much further danger. I looked around, tried to take stock. From the sound of footsteps scrambling back up the tunnel some of our side had gotten away clean, but there were four bodies in our little choke point, two feathered with crossbow bolts. Sergeant Bengosun and one of his team had their shields back up in the gap, but when he looked back at me he was wild-eyed and twitching. “Wizard!”, he hissed. “What do we _do_?” The other soldier ducked reflexively as another crossbow bolt passed over their shields to glance off the ceiling.

I risked a glance out towards the drow. One woman meandered forward in front of the rest, she was dressed in the kind of tight black leather outfit that fetish artists dream of, stitched with silvery-white spider web patterns. A priestess, and probably our summoner. She was sketching lines in the air with a glowing finger, taking her time about it. Insult to injury. Not only were we about to die, our killer was _showboating_. I whispered back to the Sergeant, “You take the rest of the team and get back to the surface. We can’t hold them here.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going to deal with the summoner.”

He looked like he wanted to argue, and then like he wanted to say something and couldn’t think of what, before the two collected the soldier cowering against the wall behind us and set off up the tunnel at a rapid pace.

“Cowards!” The priestess laughed as she continued to sketch her spell. The elven language evolves at a glacial pace, and the dialect still spoken by the drow is perfectly intelligible to a surface elf, though full of odd pronunciations and the occasional shift in vocabulary. “And surfacer cowards, too! It seems like we have found the right path!”

I stepped out into the opening before I could think of a reason not to. A simple deflection charm sent the crossbow bolts off into the walls, and I stalked forward. She gave me a long, appraising look, taking in my colouring, practical clothing, and lightly-enchanted sabre. “You leave a _half-breed_ behind to stall us? And what, a porter? Is this a _joke_?”

“I’m not laughing”

“Maybe you would be, if you were aware of the irony.”

The sword I held had been a personal gift from the High Lady on my joining her Spellguard; its core enchantments were simple, but buried in the silver letters inlaid upon the slender blade was a powerful and subtle working that let it reach into and even cut at the Weave of magic itself. An invaluable tool for a mage-killer.

I smiled brightly at the priestess, who had stopped her casting to stare in puzzlement at me, and then I stuck my sword into the glowing spellwork taking shape in front of her, following it up with a spike of magical power. There was a screech that made the vrock from earlier sound not unlike a harpist of surpassing skill, the purple sparks of strong _faerzress_ sparked up at the corners of my vision, and I was suddenly tumbling through the air at tremendous speed over a blasted landscape of inky blackness stretched across with vast spider-webs. An instant later that horror ripped itself apart, and for a moment I saw infinity before unconsciousness reached up to claim me.

***  
_Somewhere entirely different a shirtless man with alabaster skin and leathery wings crouched over a dagger, holding a length of copper pipe against it with both hands like his life depended on it.. The dagger stood on its point without apparent support in the midst of an elaborate and unhinged arcane construct, and seemed perfectly happy to remain where it was, even as the man pressed the pipe into it. He gave the dagger a mistrustful stare, then gingerly raised his hands away. The pipe stayed where it was but behind him something else started rattling, and the man jumped to correct it, screaming in frustration._  
***

I tried to move on waking up. There was no telling where I’d landed, given the manner of my arrival I could easily still be in the Abyss, and if I was very lucky something would be along in a moment that only wanted to eat me. By some miracle I’d kept ahold of my sword without cutting myself, and I kept a tight hold on it as I got to my feet and took in my surroundings. I stood in a long tunnel, very like the one I’d just left, dark grey stone with a smoothness that suggested it had been bored or eroded rather than cut. I could see some distance, down to forks in both directions, and what I saw was almost deserted. Perhaps twenty feet away sat a drow woman in black leather covered in spiderweb patterns sitting against the wall, head back, eyes closed. The _summoner_. I approached, cautiously, but she made no movement.

“Nice job, surfacer.” I stopped, tensing, but didn’t react. “Any idea where we are?”

“The Abyss.”

“Give the magical background a check. Something’s off. If this is the Abyss it’s the weirdest layer I’ve ever encountered.”

I frowned and reached for my magic. A quick flare and a bright globe of light burst into being, hovering just above and behind me. “It seems to be working fine to me.”

The priestess tried to give me a quizzical stare, but flinched away from the light and closed her eyes again. “Fine. Have it your way. I suppose you’re going to kill me now?”

I paused. Her tone was almost bored, but her posture was tense. “You have another suggestion?”

“We both want to get home. I suggest we collaborate.”

I blinked. Then it dawned on me that she was serious. I tried not to laugh. “Right. So you can pull one over on the gullible surface-folk, poison me in my sleep as a sacrifice to your goddess?”

She smiled, eyes still closed. “Well, we can try to kill each other, but that would take a long time and whoever survived would be tired, out of spells, and still stuck in some inexplicable and possibly horribly dangerous place. My way at least when we get back to trying to kill each other we’d be in walking distance of home at the end of it.”

My hand tightened on my sword. “Do you tell the story of the farmer and the serpent down where you’re from?”

She waved a hand breezily. “Some surfacer parable about how some things are just not to be trusted. I take it that’s a no, then?” She opened her eyes and stared into mine. This time she showed no particular hesitance to glare into the light. “I’m offering you no violence, surfacer. Are you still going to try and kill me?”

“Tyr’s codes permit the execution of prisoners when the resources to keep the imprisoned are not available.” I tried to sound as bland as she did. I didn’t think I’d managed.

The priestess smiled again. “But are _you_ going to do it?”

It would be so easy. My arm was extended, my sword held in a trembling grip perhaps a foot from her face. She wouldn’t have time to call up a spell, I’d have felt it by now if she had anything prepared. One slice. And the look of satisfaction in her dying eyes as I realized, deep down, we weren’t all that different. I backed up a pace, sheathed my sword, turned, and walked away.

***  
_Somewhere else the shirtless man with the wings stepped back from his elaborate assemblage of wires and spellwork, hands held tentatively before him. He glared at it as if daring it to move out of alignment again. A moment passed, then another. Sweat beaded on the man’s brow. A leather glove with a decorative golden border around the cuff twitched, then stilled. He relaxed, turned, and exited the closet behind the bar. The project was all well and good, but he had a business to run here._


	3. Picking Fights With Strange Drow Of Unfamiliar Capabilities Will End Badly, Usually For You

*** _Ka’sara_ ***

By the time twenty minutes had passed wandering around in the grey basalt maze faintly lit by glowing fungi I was kicking myself. I’d saved up for months to get myself a backpack anchoring dimensional storage enchantments, carefully loaded it with spare tools, food, camping supplies, backup weapons, and then at the first sign of trouble I’d left it behind because it was _heavy_ and now I was stuck on another plane without even a notebook.

Magic on my home plane is heavily mediated. Elaborate spell-forms are necessary to make it do anything complicated, yes, but if you get it wrong it just doesn’t _do_ anything. The amount of work that goes into constructing a novel spell is incredible, slow, and very tedious; if you get things slightly out of alignment the spell won’t interface correctly with the magical background and won’t draw power. Learning magic is memorization and procedure, and magical artifacts are so much more common than spellcasters because it’s much faster and easier to train short-lived creatures to write cleanly than to hold clear spell forms in their heads.

Here, though? The air was _saturated_. The amount of magic I could pull out of the air on a whim _terrified_ me. I tried to put together a simple spatial coordinate structure, which almost blew me up and gave some very contradictory results. Then I tried to map the dimensional boundaries, which turned up an oddly-charged astral, one accessible plane, and two inaccessible planes as well as a resonance that confirmed my suspicion that we were in a pocket dimension, and in the process accidentally set up a feedback loop and nearly blew myself up again. I decided I might want to build myself an overflow mechanism before I did anything else.

I don’t know if my captor knew how close he was to being blown up, but clearly he had some inkling since he was being very quiet.

Shortly thereafter we found a bottomless pit.

Bottomless pits are not in the realm of sane geometry, but unlike larger dimensions that occur naturally pocket dimensions are often constructed by people who wish “sane geometry” would leave them alone so they could have fun. In the minds of such twisted individuals it’s perfectly sensible to plant a bottomless pit on top of something, or to put things at the bottom of a bottomless pit, or to make people walk through a roofless room (where the ceiling extends upwards to eternity) just to mess with them.

Of course it could be a perfectly ordinary pit with a bottom we just couldn’t see from the edge, but somehow the long narrow bridge with no railings stretching out over the middle of it suggested that whoever built this place was _exactly_ the kind of asshole who would think a bottomless pit was funny.

“I’ll keep an eye out in case I need to catch you.”

I turned a glare on the wraith, who smiled innocently at me, and decided not to favor that with a reply. The bridge was narrow, yes, and had no railings, but I grew up on a mountain. I’d climbed glaciers for _fun_ before. I tried not to think about all the falling off I’d also done, focused on putting one foot in front of the other, and got to the other side with a minimum of fuss, and while I was distracted wondering whether it’d be too late for a sarcastic retort I rounded a corner and came face-to-face with a sword. There was a woman holding it, too, but due to some quirks of perspective and scale the sword did seem to be the main thing.

*** _Arunae_ ***

Underground fieldcraft is a very different skill from aboveground fieldcraft. You listen for echoes rather than animals, you pick out scuff marks on stone rather than imprints in soft ground, “shelter” means “someplace you can’t be snuck up on” instead of “someplace protected from the weather”, and the lack of rainfall means that if you’re unlucky the nearest living things could be twenty miles away. I determined quickly that wherever I was had been built; the walls were regular and the floors debris-free, the grade was almost entirely flat, and the glowing mushrooms were both the only sign of life and served as surprisingly well-spaced wall lighting.

I stared at the mushrooms for a bit. They grew in horizontal ridges poking off the wall, bioluminescence shining faintly from the underside. The effect was startlingly similar to a hooded lamp. I checked them with a simple divination cantrip and decided that they were digestible and probably not going to kill me, then moved on.

The disruptions to the Weave the spider priestess had mentioned bothered me. Magic is normally a straightforward thing; magical formulae are known to produce predictable results, so you do your chanting and gesticulating or whatever mental gymnastics you need to keep the spell form stable in your mind, and it latches onto the Weave to pull enough power into the material world to do what you want. In some places, though, the characteristics of the Weave are different and spells that should be safe and predictable can misfire or blow up in your face. The _faerzress_ is the most common example, but rumours abound of wild magic zones where any spell at all can do almost anything.

The Weave here felt...jumpy. Unpredictable. Not oppressive like the _faerzress_ but vibrating, so much that I thought I could hear a faint noise. Basic spells seemed to be working but I thought I should probably avoid anything more powerful before I could figure out what was happening.

So I pressed on. The tunnels wound about themselves into a perplexing maze, the mushrooms continued their march along the walls. No scuff or spoor revealed the passage of anyone else and I didn’t detect any obvious signs of civilization, apart from a glass panel inset into a wall that had the word “preparedness” written neatly across it in faintly glowing letters. In perfectly legible Chondothan, too. It put me in mind of a philosopher I’d once met who argued at length that the Abyss was infinite, and therefore anything one could imagine would be contained within its layers. It could also be some kind of runic trap. I moved on.

About twenty minutes later I rounded a corner and found two encouraging signs: a flight of stairs upward pointing at right angles to the tunnel I was in, and the sound of footsteps from further along. Two sets, close, both with the solid shoes of surface footwear. I frowned, surely I should have heard them from further away? I hadn’t been _that_ distracted. Then a man’s voice said “I’ll keep an eye out in case I need to catch you.” in elvish with an odd lilting accent. I parked myself at the corner, sword ready, listening. The other snorted but didn’t reply.

I breathed slow and deep, listening, timing, then straightened and turned sideways to poke the point of my sword into the face of a very surprised-looking drow woman. She had the pure-black skin common to the deep drow, but her eyes were an amber I’d never seen before, and the high-collared reddish coat looked more like it had come out of a Waterdhavian tailor’s shop than the Underdark. The striped hair was also quite strange.

We stared at each other for a moment. Her hands were empty, raised in a placating gesture. “Put the sword down.” Elvish, again, with a smoother accent than the other one, though obviously not used to giving demands.

I stepped back, relaxed into a low guard. Not as threatening but ready to bring my sword back into play at need. “Tell the other one to get out here where I can see him.”

She managed to get back to not looking surprised pretty quickly before saying “Serrax, she knows you’re here!” over her shoulder, not taking her eyes off me. The other one, Serrax, presumably, strolled casually around the corner. He was also a drow, but his skin was a few shades lighter and his clothing a mottled grey-green hide that looked like it’d disappear into the background if he were in a forest. Down here it just looked like some kind of bizarre fashion statement. The woman was tense in a panicky way, but he was very still, hands at his sides where I could see them but ready to go for the short swords at his hips in a hurry.

I tried to keep my voice casual. “Are you two from around here?”

They exchanged a blank look. The man, Serrax, said “No. Are you?”, and the woman followed by snapping “Do I _look_ like I live down a hole in the ground to you?”

I blinked. “...You look like _drow_ to me…”

The woman nodded sagely. “So do you, girl, so do you. I’m guessing half from the hair, and since whichever parent was a drow clearly didn’t stick around to explain some very important things I guess I’ll have to do it. I am Sulatar, which means I live up a mountain, and this one,” here she gestured at the man, “is Qualitar, which means he wanders around a tropical jungle sleeping in temporary treehouses and cleaning his teeth with the bones of unwary explorers he’s eaten.” By that point her voice had taken on a singson cadence of the sort you’d use to explain things to very slow children. The man smiled unpleasantly at the thing about cleaning his teeth, I shuddered. “Neither of us lives in a hole. The third major drow cultural group is called the Umbragen, they _do_ live down holes in the ground, but they’re also highly insular and have no trade relationships with sane people who like fresh air and sunlight, so I can’t tell you where to find one if for some reason you do want to hang out down holes instead of trying to _escape_.” She smiled brightly, hands still held palms beside her. “Any questions?”

I closed my mouth. “Let’s start over. My name is Arunae, and I come from Silverymoon. I woke up here after a summoning spell I was trying to disrupt exploded unpredictably. The spider priestess who was casting it is here too, but I haven’t seen her since I woke up. I have no idea where I am. How about you?”

The man frowned. “ _Silverymoon_? I’ve been all over Xen’drik and I don’t recognize the name, what continent is it on?” The woman followed it up with “Silly name for a town, that.”

I bristled. “Like you’re any better. Zzzenderik? With a glottal stop in the middle? How many apostrophes do you need to spell that?” We glared at each other. Serrax cleared his throat. “North-western Faerun. It’s a city-state in the Dalelands, north of the High Forest.” Blank looks. “Due east of Neverwinter?” Nothing. “Above Menzoberranzan? Near to Waterdeep?” I gave up.

*** _Ka’sara_ ***

I nodded briskly. “No common physical landmarks, got it. Planar references don’t help a lot, I have a colleague who’s a theorist in planar mechanics and he doesn’t think there are any landmarks or reference points across planes. The demands of arcane physics require a distribution of similar satellite planes around any material plane, things like the major elemental planes and the coterminous planes will be the same simply because we come from places with compatible physics.” I stopped, and looked from the blank stare on the strange half-drow’s face to the blank stare on the wraith’s face. I sighed. “It’s a cutting-edge theory, I know, and brutally difficult to test, but the point is that just because this place probably has its own elemental fire like Fernia doesn’t mean we can just go there and it’ll be our elemental fire, even if it might aid navigation.”

Arunae glowered. It seemed a very natural expression on her. “So it’s not simply a matter of casting a plane shift and warping ourselves home, then.”

“No. Without proper reference points we could end up anywhere, or everywhere, or smeared across the cosmos as a string of dissociated particulate matter nowhere near anywhere.” I peered at Arunae, keeping my hands out to my sides. Her height and bulk would have betrayed her part-human heritage even if her colouring didn’t. “Could you put the sword down? I don’t want to end up as dissociated particulate matter before I have to.”

She gave an incredulous snort. “Do you normally let your guard down around others of your kind?”

“My _kind_? What does that mean?”

“Cruel, sadistic, vengeful, treacherous, greedy, paranoid, scheming?” She frowned. “Why am I explaining this to you?”

I must admit to a certain amount of bafflement on the subject myself. “Do you make a habit of passing summary judgement on people from other planes for the crime of looking kind of like some assholes from your plane?”

Arunae gave me a hard stare. “Better cautious than ending up dead as a sacrifice to whatever vicious goddess compels obedience wherever you come from.”

“I don’t even _have_ a goddess! The central figure in my religion is a non-deistic abstract fire that symbolizes enlightenment!” I looked over at Serrax, and racked my brains for details on Vulkoor, the god of the Qualitar. Scorpions. Patience. Striking from the shadows. “His god is kind of vicious, though.”

“ _Thank_ ; you, Ka’sara.” He shot me a glare before turning back to the half-drow. “Is there anything we can do to convince you that we mean you no harm?”

*** _Arunae_ *** 

I studied the drow in his incongruous grey-green leather for a moment. Certain things are constants about different species: humans will go after what they want with single-minded determination, moon elves will talk your ear off for an age before getting anywhere near their point, and drow are always plotting to murder everyone around them. Still…‘Do not hasten to judgement, justice requires contemplation and wisdom.’ A common refrain in the temples of Tyr. “Do you have any way to enforce a magically binding oath?” 

“Sure. Do you have a live scorpion handy, and are you prepared for breaking the oath to be fatal?” Gods, he was _serious_. Vicious indeed. 

Thankfully the woman broke in before I had to think of a reply to that. “Or we could try the version without the pain and death, which conveniently doesn’t require a live scorpion.” She glared back and forth between me and the male drow for a moment. “This is normally a religious ritual, but the spell should work fine without any consecration or invoking the Promise of Fire on anyone. Be quiet for a moment.” With that she held her hand out, and a dancing fire sprung into being above her upraised palm. It flickered, turned white, and she opened her eyes again. “The flame will respond statements, if it turns red the statement is true, if it turns blue the statement is false.” The flame briefly shifted to red, then turned back white. 

“Seems like a handy tool.” Red. Ha. “I am a dwarf.” Blue. I guess it was working, then. “Have either of you ever been to Menzoberrenzan?” Nothing. I shot the woman a quizzical look. 

“It only responds to statements.” The fire turned red, she let it fade back to white before going on. “And no.” Red. 

I turned to the man and cocked an eyebrow. “I don’t know what that is.” Red. Good. “Have you ever killed anyone outside of combat?” 

My turn to be taken aback as he cocked an eyebrow right back. “No.” Red. “Have you?” 

“Yes. My judicial role requires I act as executioner in some cases.” Red. He moved on before I could ask for clarification. “Have you ever seen this place before?” 

“Not this place, nor anything like it, not before I arrived here about an hour ago.” Red. “Who determines what laws you enforce?” 

“The elders of my tribe. I have no input, though I do have some discretion on punishment.” Red. “Does your role where you come from require that you see combat frequently?” 

The woman waved her other hand in the air, catching both out attention. She looked strained. “Guys, I’m happy you’re bonding over all the knife-measuring, but this is kind of hard to sustain.” Red. She glared at her hand for a moment. “I intend no harm towards either of you, and will share any way home with you if I find one.” Red. 

I looked expectantly at the man. He looked back, evenly, then rolled his eyes and added “I also intend no harm to either of you, and will help you get home if I can.” Red. 

I nodded. Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith. “I intend no harm to either of you, and will help you get home if it is within my power.” Red. I sheathed my sword. 

The woman, Ka’sara, let the flame disperse, wiped her brow, and sighed. “ _Finally_. Now, is that a stairwell I see back there?” Before anyone else could say anything she had trooped off right past me and was marching up the stairs, leaving the man and I to trail along behind. 

I gave him a sidelong glance. “It occurs to me to wonder how we can understand each other. You seem to be speaking perfectly intelligible elven to me, but you’re from another plane that’s never been in contact with mine before?” 

He shrugged. “I don’t have an explanation. Your world evolved drow that look like us and are called the same thing, yet have a wildly different culture? Maybe there’s some basic feature of the universe that forces language to develop similarly, even across planes.” 

I frowned. “That sounds too...I don’t know. Too neat? Convenient?” 

“Do you have a better explanation?” 

I didn’t, so I let it slide. 

*** 

_Somewhere else two women surveyed a cobbled-together hodgepodge of spellwork. The first was a naga, humanoid torso blending smoothly at the waist into a long serpentine tail, the second a slim human, her neat suit out of place against the grim stonework. “Perhaps it would be best,” the naga said, “if she didn’t find anything down here she could use to finish Rowe’s work.”_  
The human nodded. “My thoughts exactly.” She stepped to the center of the mad construct, where an elegant sabre of elven work and a matching dagger stood on their points, and removed them from a spell circle of surpassing complexity.  
A barely-perceptible shudder passed through the room. The naga let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding. Elsewhere, things began to change. 

*** _Ka’sara _***__

____

I don’t think of myself as claustrophobic, but being down a tunnel on an unfamiliar plane with only a scorpion wraith and an aggressive woman with a sword for company must have had me more on-edge than I’d realized, since when the tremor came I was crouched down in a corner with my hand protecting the back of my neck before I had time to think. Then I started wondering whether that’d make a difference if there was a cave-in, and whether what I’d felt was even an earthquake, and then I noticed the other two looking at me oddly. 

____

Fortunately any ridicule was almost immediately forestalled by a terrible stone-on-stone grinding coming from all around. Just up the stairway from us the walls slammed shut, stairs melted into a slope which fused with the wall in a shockingly efficient display of rapid earth movement, and the stretch we were on leveled itself out into a new landing, sending all three of us sprawling. I scrambled back to my feet, looking around wildly, to find Serrax and Arunae in a similar state of bafflement. The whole stairwell had closed up around us, leaving us in a small level chamber with a new exit off to the left. There was some kind of odd panel of glass and metal set into the new wall ahead of us, with a small green arrow somehow inside the glass pointing off towards the new passage. As we stared a small message reading “Exit” lit up next to the arrow, followed a couple of seconds later by the phrase “We apologize for the inconvenience.” 

____

After a moment of silence Serrax said “Suddenly teleporting in the presence of an unstable dimensional effect doesn’t sound like that bad of an idea.” 

____

Arunae snorted. “Don’t be silly. Whoever sent that message is being polite about it but I think they want us to leave.” 

____

Serrax shot a withering look back. “Do you normally take directions from strangers with no visible means of observing or communicating with you?” 

____

I interrupted. “When they demonstrate the power to casually bury me alive but don’t use it, sure!” I started down the new passage, then paused, and added in my best stage whisper, “Might want to be quiet about it, though, no need to forget caution _entirely_.” 

____

Arunae pushed to the fore as we advanced cautiously. This tunnel was almost indistinguishable from the ones down at the bottom of the stairs, complete with strategically-placed glowing mushrooms, but it rapidly widened out into a vast cavern, big enough that I could feel air moving. If I closed my eyes I could almost pretend I was outside. The campfire in the middle of it all aided the illusion; there were three figures sitting around the fire and one more slumped against a stalagmite nearby. 

____

As we approached the figures resolved themselves into some of the most bizarrely dressed drow I’d ever seen. They all wore black; the two women and one man around the fire had ludicrously tight garments of some slightly shiny material cut full of strategic holes to try and disguise where skin stopped and clothes began, though the combined effect made them look like illustrations in some kind of special-interest magazine. Or maybe strippers. The woman slumped off to the side had more practical combat gear on, but it was also in black and was covered in silver-white tracery that was probably supposed to look like a spider-web but just made her look like an abused painting stored behind glass. 

____

Then a waft of air sent the smells of the campfire towards us and I had to fight down bile. The slumped woman’s right arm ended in a charred stump just short of where the wrist should be. One of the three around the campfire leaned over and idly poked the stump with some kind of long implement as I watched, and a ripple of amusement passed around the fire at the low animal noise of pain that followed. To my left Arunae stiffened at the sight, then relaxed at the noise, and before I could react she’d abandoned any effort at stealth and strode boldly into the campfire’s light, calling “Good day to you, travellers!” 

____

I exchanged frustrated looks with Serrax. He set off slipping between stalagmites to follow Arunae, I ducked off to the side in search of higher ground, and set to preparing some ray spells. Somehow I thought I’d need them soon. 

____

*** _Arunae_ *** 

____

The spider priestess aroused conflicting feelings; a hated foe, yes, not worthy of trust, definitely, but also a link home, however twisted. And when the strange drow poked her wound something in me snapped. Sometimes self-preservation isn’t enough. 

____

The strange drow’s reaction to my approach was puzzling; they jumped like they’d been startled, scrambled to their feet, and moved to face me in a line. We couldn’t have gotten so close without being heard if they’d been paying any attention at all, and responding to an obvious distraction without any thought for their prisoner? Definite amateurs, this lot. Which was confirmed more directly when the woman in the middle sneered and demanded “What House do you come from that half-breeds are not strangled at birth?” 

____

I’d unhooked my scabbard from my belt as I walked, I brought it up in front of me and grasped the hilt with my right hand. Across the fire I couldn’t see the confident face of the woman who had dared me to kill her mere hours ago in the shocked face of the spider priestess. I smiled, and met the leader of the strange drow’s eyes. “No House, slave of a treacherous bitch-goddess, I am a free woman, and I am here to educate you in civilized behaviour.” 

____

The two flanking the leader exchanged incredulous glances, the leader’s eyes didn’t leave mine at all. “You alone, half-breed?,” she sneered. “I am not impressed, not by your insults, nor your thin blood. If you’ve never been taught not to bring a blade to a priestess of Scyllith I shall be glad to enlighten you!” A shield of golden light sprang up around her, the other two moved forward, drawing knives so viciously spiked they must break and need replacing whenever they’re used in combat. I kept my hands together in front of me and prepared to receive the priestess’ spell. 

____

And then a thin needle of fire speared through the male’s throat, and I felt a profound rush of gratitude as he fell. For the assistance in combat, certainly, but in that moment I started to believe there might be more drow in the world who weren’t vicious psychopaths or escapees traumatized by a lifetime under the rule of vicious psychopaths. A fragment of honour, maybe, to that half of my blood. 

____

Calling what followed a ‘fight’ would devalue the word. The Scyllithene priestess fired off some kind of bolt of purple-black energy at me, I drained its power before it had crossed half the distance between us and returned a stream of lightning that sent her shield blazing up like a bonfire for a brief moment before collapsing. The strangeness to the Weave in this place seemed to feed power into my spell. The other female had taken barely a step before Serrax materialized out of the dark and jabbed a blade under her guard straight into a kidney, he’d recovered his weapon and started cleaning it before she hit the floor. The priestess backpedalled frantically, trying to raise another shield under a constant barrage of spellfire from Ka’sara’s position; her eyes were still wide with disbelief when my sword took her under the chin. I paused to look around. The whole thing might have taken ten seconds; all three of the strange drow were frozen in expressions of surprise. 

____

Then I looked down at the spider priestess. Serrax had unrolled an elaborate bundle of vials and pouches and was prodding at her injury, she was still staring at me. “She’s from my home plane. We fought before coming here, I don’t know her name.” 

____

“Cruel, sadistic, et cetera, servant of a vicious goddess and all that?” Ka’sara had caught up, and when I looked around she’d started stripping the bodies. “What?”, she responded to my incredulous stare. “We’re going to need local currency at some point, right?” 

____

“And all that, yes.” The spider priestess’ voice was taught and hoarse. “Their currency may not help much, I gather they’re from down below.” She coughed, and waved off Serrax. “This is an unreliable path to the surface, and they were seeking someone called Arachne at the end of it.” 

____

“Trade goods, then.” Ka’sara had quite a pile going by that point, though she did look nauseous at the experience. I respected her willingness to help, at least. 

____

“And my name is Thyrenna, surfacer. You?” 

____

I hesitated. Thyrenna the spider priestess, who found amusement in my discomfort. “Arunae. Your medical assistant there is Serrax, and the amateur vulture behind me is Ka’sara.” She didn’t protest, though something hit me lightly in the back and Thyrenna grinned weakly. 

____

“Are we bringing her with us, or putting her out of her misery?” Serrax had a remarkably level gaze to go along with the casual attitude towards life and death. Odd for a healer. Perhaps less odd for an executioner. 

____

I made a quick decision. “She’ll come with us. She knows more about the lay of the land than we do, even if she did make a bad impression on the locals.” 

____

“Even with all the treacherousness?” 

____

I looked back at Ka’sara. “Think she can pull something while that badly hurt, with three of us watching?” 

____

“I suppose not.” She’d finished stripping the corpses of valuables and was giving Thyrenna a hard stare of her own. 

____

“Fine, then.” Serrax pulled a tiny vial of what looked like water out, and started carefully measuring drops from a couple of other vials as he addressed his patient. “Your system has been badly shocked, without attention you’ll probably be catatonic in a day. That arm is working on some infections that will probably kill you shortly thereafter. I can keep you alive for now but I need a proper workspace and sterile tools sooner rather than later.” He looked back at me. “You’ll have to carry her.” 

____

Heh. My drow blood normally made me the smallest in a group, with these three my human blood neatly reversed the issue. Trapped between two worlds indeed. “If I argued to spare her in spite of the treacherousness having to carry something heavy isn’t going to change my mind.” 

____

“ _So_ nice to feel appreciated.” Thyrenna took the vial Serrax offered, gave it a dubious sniff, drained it, and handed the empty vial back. She frowned, opened her mouth, closed it again, then her eyelids drooped and she let out a weak giggle. 

____

“As far as I can tell the arm is the only injury, go under the shoulders and the knees and try not to jostle it.” 

____

I leaned down and picked up the spider priestess. She tried to loop her good arm around my neck, then winced and brought it back down to hold onto the stump. “Does this make us _friends_?” 

____

I made a conscious and deliberate decision not to drop her. 

____


	4. Don't Taunt the Archmage

*** _Ka’sara_ ***

Whatever force had given us the sign pointing to the exit earlier clearly wasn’t messing around. Maybe half a mile past the cavern where we’d attacked the native drow was another staircase, and a flight up that and through a door we emerged right behind a market stall in some kind of subterranean bazaar. It was long and open, with stalls along the sides that wouldn’t have seemed out of place dropped onto any street in a Sulatar city, or in Dar’quat, or Stormreach for that matter, except for being underground. Two dwarves haggled with a gnome across a counter covered with alchemical reagents, another dwarf sat behind a second stall leaning back in his seat and polishing a shield. The stall we’d emerged behind was occupied by a drow in an elaborate white dress, with glowing blue streaks in her hair and a large matching tattoo around her face going down one arm. She wouldn’t have looked out of place at home. If the glowing bits were a warm colour, at least.

The wall closed back up behind us almost soundlessly, and the drow woman looked back, blinked, and her eyes went very wide. The dwarf with the weapon stall coughed and laid the polishing rag down, his hand disappearing under the counter. The dwarves and the gnome across the way looked over to see what the commotion was, and started reaching for their own weapons.  
Before this descended into a bloodbath I raised my hands peaceably and said, in Galifaran, “Hey, folks, no cause for alarm.”

Serrax added, in the same language, “We’ve got a wounded person here. I don’t suppose there’s a private space and fresh water around here somewhere?”

The tension faded a bit, the dwarves and the gnome turned back to a low argument. The dwarf with the weapon stall grunted and went back to his polishing. The drow woman pointed towards a doorway covered by a ragged red velvet curtain and said “The front of the Grim Visage is that way.” She paused. “Where did you come from?”

“That is a deceptively simple question.” I turned to Serrax. “You three go ahead and start the medicking, I’ll try and pick up some supplies?”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “You going to be all right on your own?”

“This isn’t my first dig.” Arunae nodded acknowledgement as the other three proceeded around the drow woman’s wares and through the curtain, Thyrenna flailed her good hand in a vague imitation of a wave. I followed far enough to get around the counters, then turned back to the drow woman and sized her up. She was taller than me (nothing unusual, most people are), and aside from the decorative glowing blue bits her skin was the pure-black of isolated drow populations. Like the Scyllithenes down below, or Thyrenna. Or me, for that matter. I smiled, showing teeth, and she jumped. I guess four scruffy-looking strange drow had just unexpectedly appeared behind her, I might be jumpy too. Especially if there was a chance those drow might be Scyllithenes, or from the Menzo-whatsit Arunae mentioned.

“Hello! I’m Ka’sara Nethayme of Ashvale, and I’m in need of supplies.”

On familiar ground now. “Radivass. I do enchanting work, I don’t sell supplies.” She crossed her arms and gave me a level look.

“Absolutely, but unfortunately my stock of necessary materials is on the other side of a nasty and possibly irreplicable dimensional accident. I need scroll paper, charged inks, a basic engraving toolkit, Khyber-shard, unattuned quartz, a spool of mid-gauge wire, and a staff blank. Help a fellow practitioner out?”

“Did you manage to bring anything to trade to this side of your nasty dimensional accident?” The dwarf at the weapon stall snorted, Radivass glanced his way with the promise of future retribution.

“As a matter of fact I was lucky enough to run into some on this side.” I took the cloth bundle of material I’d taken from the Scyllithenes; knives, jewelry, loose gemstones. All the portable stuff that might retain value. 

Radivass’ eyes bugged out at the assortment, then she looked up at me. “... _Where_ did you say you found all this?”

“I didn’t!”

Her mouth opened, closed, opened, and then she leaned down below her countertop and started assembling materials on the counter. Paper, inks, a case that proved full of fine-tipped knives and chisels, a box of quartz nested in sawdust to keep the crystals separated. “What was that other thing you wanted? Khyber shard?”

I nodded. “I don’t know if your name for it would be the same. They should be clear crystals, found deep below ground in geodes of irregular tapered spikes, with a lattice of blue-black veins that sort of look like draconic script if you squint. They’re magically very stable and are used in anchoring complex enchantments.”

Radivass’ head popped back up over the counter, she was carrying a spool of wire. Probably steel. “Draconic _script_?” I nodded. “Do dragons even…Nevermind. I’ve never seen or heard of anything like that. ‘Staff blank’ as in ‘stick’?”

“Yes. Hard wood, four to five feet, sized for normal hands, seasoned and treated.”

“It’s not a material I make much use of.” She frowned, turned to the dwarf. “Fengir, you got a staff or an unfinished polearm haft that might meet the description?”

The dwarf made a show of considering the request. “Might do. What’s in it for me?” Radivass rolled her eyes and tossed him a ruby out of the assortment in front of her; he caught it, held it up to the light, and nodded approvingly. “Sure.” The ruby disappeared into a pocket, and Fengir pulled a black staff about five feet long out from under his counter and handed it over to me.

I gave the staff a once-over and followed with a magical probe, it certainly fit the description. “That’ll do.” Then I looked at Radivass, who was still looking at me like I had slightly too many heads, retrieved the tools and a few gemstones from her counter, and nodded. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

“Likewise.” When I glanced back before pushing through the curtain to the Grim Visage she had put the valuables I’d traded her away, but she was still staring.

*** _Arunae_ ***

The front of the Grim Visage turned out to be a surprisingly ordinary-looking bar. Mostly. The walls and floor were stone, there were no windows, but otherwise the decor could have been dropped anywhere in the Dalelands and drawn little comment. However the locals told time underground it was apparently either too early or too late for drinking, the whole space was empty except for a woman behind the bar, who gave a cheery “Hello, welcome, welcome!” before being taken aback by a second look at the motley procession we made up.

Serrax walked straight up to the bar and counted a few coins out. “We need a room for a short time, one with a…” he frowned around at the torches; they flickered like firelight, but didn’t appear to give off much smoke. “Some way to boil water. And if there’s any chemical antiseptic somewhere in this hole I suspect I’m going to need a lot of it.” He leaned over the bar then, looked down at something, frowned, squinted at the bartender, and shook his head.

“Do I have something on my face?”

“It’s nothing.”

She sighed and took his coins. “Don’t you folks normally leave the injured to fend for themselves?”

He glared back at us. I shrugged. Thryenna stifled a giggle. “Not usually. Apparently that makes me the weird one.”

The bartender snorted. “Point to you, I guess. My name is Sarriki, I’m management here temporarily. Our rooms don’t have ventilation for a fire but we should be able to set you up at the hearth in here, I’ll fetch a pot and some bedding.” I did a double take as she slithered out from behind the bar, from the waist up she looked perfectly human, further down she melded into a massive snake tail, like a drawing I’d seen once of the snake-folk of Chult. I looked from her to Serrax’ scaled-hide attire, frowning.

He shrugged. “She doesn’t seem bothered.”

Sarriki returned a moment later with a thin mattress, a plain cast iron pot of water, and a bag of bandages. Together we arranged Thyrenna in front of the hearth, with a bit of coaxing she let Serrax at her injured arm. Sarriki winced at the smell. “What happened there?”

“We rescued her from a group of Scyllithenes a ways down from here.” I didn’t succeed at keeping a neutral tone. I don’t think I tried very hard.

Thyrenna coughed, and reached out with her good hand to pat me on the knee. “All respect to your righteous anger but they didn’t do this. Or at least not directly.” I frowned and gestured for her to continue. “When I came upon them in the tunnels I tried to call on my magic to defend myself, but my connection to the Goddess wasn’t there. One of the other background fields was accessible, but its energy was wildly unstable and I’m afraid it rather got away from me.” Sarriki was on the other side of the bar from us in a flash.

“You blew your own hand off trying to use unfamiliar magic.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

Serrax spoke up from the other side of Thyrenna. “That’d explain some things.” He frowned down at the spider priestess. “Looking just at the wound here it looks like someone chopped your hand off and left it to fester for weeks, but the progress of the infection since we picked you up supports the idea that it’s magically accelerated somehow. I don’t have the skill to just dump magical healing into the wound. Best case it’d drain your body’s reserves entirely and you’d die peacefully.” I was glad he’d chosen to skip over the worst case. “Best I can tell the infection hasn’t spread very far and if we cut again about here,” he tapped about halfway up Thyrenna’s forearm, “and you don’t mess with it you might live.”

Thyrenna shrugged the shoulder on my side. “I assume that’s the best-case scenario?”

“I mean, if you’re really attached to the stump being exactly there you could deal with, oh, six to eight weeks of fever and delirium, and probably die anyway.”

“Yeah, let’s skip that. Get to the cutting.”

Serrax looked back over at the bar. “You don’t happen to have a bone saw somewhere in this establishment?”

Sarriki peeked out. “You’re not worried sitting that close to an uncontrolled warlock?”

I snorted. “She’s a spider priestess. They play with magic I wouldn’t dare touch all the time, just because they slip up now and again doesn’t mean they’re going to explode if you leave them unattended.”

Serrax nodded. “What she said. Bonesaw?”

“This is a kitchen, not a surgery. I’ve got a cleaver.”

“This may go down in history as the messiest amputation of all time.” He snorted. “Fine, let’s see it.”

Sarriki refused absolutely to get any closer to us than the bar, I stood up and walked over to retrieve the cleaver. It was a beautiful piece, heavy, sharp, well-balanced. I frowned at it, then at the hearthstones. “Should I take a chopping board too?”

“Like I’m going to use that for food again after you’re done with it. Go.”

Serrax was talking again quietly when I returned. “Your drug tolerance is ludicrous, that dose down below should have had you babbling nonsense for another two to three hours at least.”

“What can I say? A lifetime of partying.”

“And it’s led you to this moment, where you’re getting a bit of your arm chopped off with nothing but a cloth gag and a big woman to hold you down.” He accepted the cleaver, gave it a critical look, nodded, and set it in the fire to heat. “You’re on the shoulders, keep her flat to the mattress. Ideally we’d have someone else to hold her legs down but apparently,” he shot a glare back at the bar, “she’s a walking time bomb that we’re already kind of idiots to get anywhere near.” I hesitated. He noticed. “What, do you want to do the chopping?”

“No, no, I’m good, I’ve got the shoulders.” I fought down bile as I moved around Thyrenna to get a grip across her.

She grinned up at me upside-down. “First amputation, oh Arunae of the mighty Spellguard?”

*** _Ka’sara_ ***

The Grim Visage proved to be something almost but not entirely like a tavern, but I had no time to look around before the wraith was waving me over to the hearth, where they had Thyrenna lying down. “Ka’sara, good, get over here and sit on her legs.” I took in the scene at a glance, her injured arm on a cloth pad on the hearth, a heavy blade heating in the fire, a pad of cloth covered in some kind of smelly green stuff to the side, boiling water, bandages, Arunae pinning her shoulders down and looking faintly green.

“Do you not have sedatives for that?”

“Long story. Also? The easily background magical field with the irregular resonance? Don’t mess with it.”

I frowned, sat. “I did a brief pass through all four to establish their properties, that one’s wildly unstable. I’m not sure how you’d do anything with it other than…” I looked at Thyrenna’s arm as I put two and two together. “ _Oh_. You blew your own hand off!”

“Don’t remind me.” She put a cloth gag in and squeezed her eyes shut.

“Let me mark where I’m cutting…” Old surgeon’s trick, make sure they don’t know when it’s coming. The blade came down with a mighty “whack”, and Thyrenna made an odd noise into the gag, her back arching involuntarily (Arunae and I kept her mostly on the ground) as about two inches of forearm parted company with the rest. Serrax slapped the smelly green paste he’d prepared on over the stump and started to wind extra bandages around it. He hummed as he worked magic into the bindings, I followed his spellwork for a bit but soon gave up. Arcane magic is poorly-suited to healing so I’d never really studied it in much detail.

Thyrenna stopped moving, took her gag out, and wheezed. It took her a few starts to manage coherent speech. “Bit of a rush. When do we keep moving?”

“We’re going to go into one of the nice yuan-ti’s back rooms and you’re going to get some _sleep_ ”

The yuan-ti in question popped up from behind the bar to announce “You are absolutely not going to get some sleep here.” Her voice had taken on the calm conviction of someone used to being obeyed. “I don’t know who you are or where you come from, but you seem sadly misinformed as to the gravity of the situation here. Infernomancy is spectacularly dangerous. Someone whose control slipped up badly enough to do… _that_ ,” she gestured at us, “could easily blow up something more vital next time. And that’s not even considering the infernal leakage, contaminating this place with infernal radiation could destroy things, erode the basic enchantments that keep this place functioning, give everyone who stays here _cancer_ , or worse.” She folded her arms. We looked at each other, then down at Thyrenna, who was affecting an expression of wide-eyed innocence. “Go back down to where you came from, or go to the surface and deal with the Arachne, I don’t particularly care, but you’re not staying here.”

Arunae looked down at the priestess and asked “Can you stand?”

“Guess I’d better.” We got off her, she got up with some assistance, and managed to stand holding onto a table. “Give me a minute to get my balance.”

“Ka’sara, did you get the supplies you were after?”

“Most of them.” I nodded. “Give me five minutes to get the anchoring enchantments set up.”

Arunae turned to the yuan-ti and bowed politely. “Ma’am, I apologize for the burden we have inadvertently placed on your establishment. Might I ask for your assistance to speed us on our way?”  
I half-listened, I’d manifested a scalpel of intense heat and started sketching the basic anchoring enchantments around one end of my new staff. A wizard’s staff is a very personal thing, but there are common elements that turn a stick into a staff blank; the power components that allow the staff to draw energy from the user’s aura and the control structures that allow the wizard to access other spells woven into the staff to function are fairly standardized. I left about four inches off the end bare to make room to cap the staff or add other metallic components; by the time the five minutes were up I’d gotten the basics working and added a simple fire-lance above them. The carving work alone would be sufficient to work spells, I’d get around to doing the inlay for durability later.

With those five minutes Thyrenna was walking unaided, Serrax had badgered her into a sling for her right arm, and Arunae had convinced the yuan-ti we’d need some provisions and directions to the surface to get us out of her hair faster, and we were on our way. Twenty minutes of climbing brought us to a door, which opened onto a lawn, which smelled _fabulous_ after the stale underground air, though as it appeared to be nighttime it was still quite dark.

A soft _pop_ of displaced air announced the arrival of a teleporter, who proved to be a blond Aeren elf dressed in a vest over shirt and trousers, all in shades of green. She had a pair of skinny gold spectacles perched on her nose and a thoroughly supercilious attitude. “Right on schedule.” I’d met some Aeren elves before, she may have had the look but she definitely didn’t have the accent. “Congratulations! _Most_ of your compatriots aren’t dumb enough to try this. You get the rare honor of being an example.”

Arunae stepped to the fore and snarled back. “I’ve been on this plane a grand total of about three hours! In that time I’ve been insulted, assaulted, rescued a sworn enemy of my civilization because she’s more predictable than the psychopaths that pass for drow here, and refused safe harbor because one botched spell apparently turns people into walking sources of plague and corruption here! I have _very_ little patience left for whatever ego trip you’re on, lady!”

I winced. The magical power pouring off the Aeren was almost overwhelming, she lowered her head to stare at us over her glasses. The Arachne, the bartender had called her. “... _What_ did you just say to me?”

On the bright side as soon as we’d stepped out of the doorway the dimensional boundaries weren’t as fixed as they were before, but there was some kind of passive spell effect running over this whole place. Not as bad as the pocket dimension but dragonshards to dirt it’d do a solid job of blocking teleportation. I sent a mental spike towards Thyrenna, a quick thread of telepathic contact. _I can get us out if you can punch through the shield._

The reply was clear, but faint. _You heard what the snake-lady said, you sure you want to risk the horrible death that comes with losing control of infernomancy?_ I’d practiced this trick to have a way to talk in class without being overheard, but it made sense that civilizations with elven hearing to deal with would have similar tricks.

_You’re supposed to be some kind of bigshot at pulling stupid stunts with dangerous magic, aren’t you? Better than getting killed by Arunae shouting at archmages, anyway._

_Oh, thoroughly._ A waft of amusement accompanied the thought. _Thirty seconds, need to focus._

I nodded. The exchange had taken almost no time (another benefit of telepathic contact), and Arunae had just spat “You heard me!” at the Arachne.

“I did, yes. You may be persons of unknown, possibly unknowable, motives and capabilities that I shouldn’t allow off my campus, but it’s more likely you’re another band of Scyllithenes pulling one of the dumbest stunts I’ve ever seen.” She shook her head. “No, I think an example is still necessary.”

I sensed the massive flare of magic before I saw anything; it resembled nothing so much as an avalanche bearing down on us, and I let out a spectacularly undignified squeak and tried to duck to the ground, holding my partial staff out like some kind of shield.

When the death I was expecting didn’t arrive I opened my eyes and goggled. Arunae had her rune-etched sword out, held left-handed in a high guard, her right hand aimed off to the side. She had slid back about three feet from where she was standing and following the line of her right arm was a scar of molten earth slowly cooling to glass. The Arachne lowered her pointing finger, staring incredulously, and Arunae snarled “Make an example of someone else, you arrogant _bitch_!”

Without speaking she returned to the attack with a barrage of spells that would have given a dragon pause. They flickered past almost too fast for me to follow; a full spectrum of elemental attacks, frag-ports, death hexes, simple hammers of telekinetic force. Arunae tried to keep up with the barrage but within seconds her sword had melted and shattered, and she was barely holding her defense, Serrax bracing her from behind with a hand on her shoulder and a flow of rejuvenating magic. I sent _hurry_ to Thyranna, who sent back _now_ , and to my magical senses a screeching rent opened in the defensive field; I grabbed Serrax with one hand, Thyranna was holding my other shoulder, and with a flare of light I unleashed the teleport spell I’d been holding, sending us towards the greatest concentration of magic I could sense.

***

“ _Arachne!_ ”

Arachne Tellwyrn stood, arms crossed, tapping a foot, staring at the small island of living grass surrounded by a blasted wasteland that used to be the central quad of the Unseen University. She waved absently at her reinforcements, students and professors both in varying states of wakefulness, drawn both by the noise and by the colossal outpouring of magic. “Show’s over, everyone, go back to bed. Give the lawn a wide berth until it’s had a chance to cool.” Grumbling and muttering followed the pronouncement, but the eclectic crowd began to drift back towards their dormitories. Let them mutter. She had other things to worry about.

Alaric Yornhaldt pushed through and trotted over to where she stood. “Arachne, what happened? Please tell me you didn’t just decide to redecorate the quad on a whim.”  
She looked over at the dwarf absently. “What? No, not that. I’m not quite sure what happened. Though I have every suspicion it’s going to come back and bite me in the ass at some point.”

“Was the campus attacked?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know if they even knew we were here.” Professor Tellwyrn waved a hand and brought a sound barrier around her and Yornhaldt. “A couple of minutes ago four drow came out of the Crawl, proceeded to deflect a barrage of magic that would give a dragon pause, somehow managed to use infernal magic to disrupt the mountain’s defenses, and teleported out.”

“Light preserve us,” Yornhaldt choked out, eyes wide. “Scyllithenes? Is there some kind of breach to the deep dark at the bottom of the Crawl?”

Tellwyrn shook her head. “I don’t think so. The ethnic makeup was wrong, and I didn’t recognize their spellwork.”

“...What?”

“It’s a mistake to think of a species as monolithic, but if there were freelance drow of their skill wandering the world surely we’d have heard of them before now. Either someone’s playing a colossal prank here somehow, or something stupidly improbable is going on.” She sighed. “I have some scrying to do tonight.”


	5. The World is Not Convenient

*** _Ka’sara_ ***

One moment I was crouched on a lawn, surrounded by an improbable group of people somehow weathering a barrage of battle magic, the next we were all in dark alley about half an inch above some well-paved level cobbles. My teleportation spell lost its chokehold on the laws of physics a moment later and we thumped lightly to the ground; Arunae lost her balance, dropped, and then rolled herself onto her back, where she lay panting. Serrax had his hands braced on his knees and looked for all the world like he couldn’t quite decide whether to vomit, and Thyrenna was leaning heavily on me. Nobody had been turned into a smear of particulate matter, nobody had attempted to materialize inside a wall, and the self-leveling safety I’d built into the spell had even set us down rather than dropping us from a height or trying to materialize us inside the earth. It isn’t every day you survive a horrific teleportation-magic backlash only to find yourself on another plane loaded with strange and hostile people, hook up with several other people in almost entirely the same boat, survive a battle with a cranky archmage, and then get through a blind teleport with no accidents. I had a sudden urge to go get involved in a card game.

“Everyone alive?” Serrax had straightened, and was looking around.

“I think so.” I tried to stand up, wobbled, and sat back down. Thyrenna had let go of me and sat back down herself, back against a wall.

“Not sure,” Arunae croaked. “Ask me in the morning.”

Serrax walked around to stand next to her head. “You were the one who wanted to pick a fight with the unfriendly wizard.”

“You heard her. Said she needed to make an ‘example’.”

“And maybe if we’d explained like civilized people we weren’t who she thought we were we might have gotten out of there without blowing up her lawn!”

“ _She_ blew up the…”

“Not the point!” Serrax snarled, pointing down at Arunae. “This is becoming a _pattern_. Next time you feel the need to escalate into a fight with a powerful being you’ve just met you’ll do so without my help! Do I make myself clear?”

She groaned and raised an arm up over her forehead. “Clear.”

Thyrenna spoke up behind me. “She might be tired enough to fall asleep out in the street, but I’d rather look for some kind of shelter. Any idea where we are?”

The alley was narrow enough to pre-date mechanized transport; it was open on both ends. The walls facing us were a mix of bare stone, plastered surface, and side doors; it was still night, and wherever we were was cold and humid. Both ends of the alley opened onto wider streets, and the muted noise of a city at night filtered through from both ends. Our surroundings were magically _alive_ , a concentrated nexus of ley-lines flowed beneath our feet and the tell-tale sparking of enchanted machinery sparked off my magical senses on all sides. Tracking a specific magical signature among this noise would be like looking for the proverbial pebble on a riverbed. Unless…

“Shit!” I scrambled to my feet, the others looked to me. “Are any of these doors open?”

“What? What’s going on?” Serrax was frowning at me, Arunae had managed to raise her head to keep me in sight as I started trying doors down one side of the alley.

“If that mage has the first clue what she’s doing she’ll be able to trace the teleport given time and equipment, and we’re all still sympathetically linked to the landing site, she may be able to trace us once she gets here.” I found an unlocked door, wrenched it open, looked back. Nobody had moved, they were staring at me. Arunae had at least managed to sit up. “I can fog the connection, but I need quiet and time to work, and we need to break line of sight to the landing site. You coming?”

They took a bit to get moving but they came, eventually. The side door had led us into a narrow hallway, a rack of heavy coats, insulated boots, and an umbrella stand spoke to the weather of this place. Arunae stared down at something in her hand, it took me a moment to realize it was all that was left of her sword. She grimaced, and tucked it away. “Are we breaking into peoples’ homes now?”

“If we’re lucky nobody’s awake.” Then I rounded a corner and stopped. The next room looked to be a kitchen, rows of cabinetry etched with faintly glowing runes spoke to a powerful suite of enchantments, but the racks of pots hanging from the ceiling were clue enough to their function.

At the other end of the long table sat four humans, all quite young, looking up from some sort of card game at our entry. Three were dressed soberly in dark colours, the girl at the head of the table wore some kind of brocade house-coat or robe in pale pink. After a brief awkward silence she stacked her cards neatly and asked “Can I help you?”

I tried to sound friendly and nonthreatening. The other three looming over me from behind didn’t help. “I’ve got a complicated but non-destructive spell I need to cast, if there’s an out-of-the-way corner I can set up in.” I glanced over my shoulder. “Also one of my colleagues here just underwent surgery and the other two tried to pick a fight with someone called Arachne, and they might need somewhere to sleep.”

The girl in pink frowned. The other three humans had gone pale. “Well. That sounds...serious. Is there a reason you were picking fights with Arachne Tellwyrn?”

Serrax waved a hand breezily. “Oh, you know. We ended up on her lawn by accident, she thought we were someone else, and wanted to make an example of us.”

“I...see.” The girl wrinkled her nose. “Might I convince you to bathe before settling down to rest?”

*** _Several hours later_ ***

Arachne Tellwyrn did not believe in outbursts. Throwing one’s scrying mirror across the room was simply not productive, no matter how bafflingly inconclusive the teleport trace it produced. If her spells were working the four drow had been dissociated into their component atoms and rained slowly down over Tiraas and half the surrounding province, but that would be _convenient_ , and if she’d learned anything in her long years it was that the world was not a convenient place.

She ran back through the conversation in her head. _On this plane for a grand total of three hours_. The male’s grey skin spoke of surface elf or human ancestry, and the half-drow couldn’t possibly be Scyllithene, not unless there was a population of humans down there somewhere. Impossible. Almost as impossible as...was she really contemplating it? She snarled and disappeared from her office with a pop, reappearing almost immediately in the library.

“Crystal!,” she barked. “I need you to pull references to portals to alternate universes. Elder god artifacts, any remnants of records from before their fall. Particularly anything that mentions drow.”

The golem librarian inclined her head politely. “Good morning, professor. A gentleman in a strange hat stopped in to leave a note for you earlier.” She raised one slender metal arm, holding out the note, Tellwyrn paused, stared at it as though she suspected it might bite, and then took it. It was a simple piece of white card folded in half, with sparkling gold writing showing a catalog reference number, several page references, a sentence reading _No, I can’t send them back, those portals would be a tremendous danger even to power on_ , and an elaborately calligraphed signature reading ‘Vesk’. Tellwyrn glared at the note, then looked up at Crystal. The golem’s glowing blue eyes dimmed and brightened again in an imitation of a blink. “I took the liberty of retrieving the indicated volume for you, professor,” she said, indicating a heavy volume resting beside her on the counter.

Tellwyrn growled. Then sighed, grabbing the book. “Pull the references anyway. He’s never this helpful unless he’s trying to aim someone somewhere.”

Crystal inclined her head again. “Of course, professor.”

*** _Arunae_ ***

I’ve never feared the darkness. I see nearly as well in total darkness as I do in the day, though in black and white, there is no unknown lurking or familiar shapes turned unrecognizable by lack of light for me. My nightmares are clearly, sharply visible. Cave-ins, trapped under the crushing weight of a million tons of earth and squeezed slowly, unable to move or breathe. Dim echoes of battles I’d fought, fire, blood, death, a sea of destruction that left me clinging to a fragment of something, and then an orc shaman froze my limbs in place and pushed me slowly under, grinning all the while…

And then I found myself in a pleasantly-appointed chamber, dressed stone and pale wood, cluttered with books and papers and odd twists of wire and crystal. Out the tall window ahead rose the roofs and spires of Silverymoon, my home, and my heart leapt in momentary hope that it had all been a terrible dream. Then I noticed I was wearing the soft pants and plain nightshirt I’d fallen asleep in, appropriated from the laundry of Lady Calverat’s house, and decided that this must be the dream. I sighed and resolved to enjoy it, reaching over to the table next to me to find a cup of tea, which proved to be an Evereskan blend.

On the other side of the table sat a tall, severe-looking human woman, dressed in something that resembled a military uniform, except for the lack of armour. Maybe she was a spellcaster. I waited. She waited. I watched her, sidelong, as she took a sip of the tea. Finally I asked “Why did you bring me here?”

“You brought me here. This is all your memory.” She examined the spines of the books on the shelf beside her with a detached curiosity. “Where is here?”

“Silverymoon. This is Lady Alustriel’s study.” I frowned at the woman. “Do I know you?”

“You’ve managed to go to great lengths to attract my attention for someone who doesn’t know me. Luck, or coincidence, I suppose.” She turned to look directly at me, and for a moment was surrounded by a halo of golden energy. I put my teacup down carefully, trying not to betray the sudden tremor in my hand. “My name is Avei. I am one of the goddesses of this world.”

I abandoned the pretense of looking at anything else as well. “What are your aspects?” I was surprised at the steadiness of my voice.

“War, justice, and women.” She smiled faintly. “Not necessarily in that order.”

“What do you mean I went to great lengths to attract your attention?”

“You’ve been on this plane for less than a day, and in that time you’ve refused to execute a defeated enemy, given strangers a fair hearing in spite of your prejudices, jumped into battle to defend the weak, and stood up to a bully.” The goddess turned her gaze back to me. “Taken together with the… _unique_...circumstances of your arrival and I thought I ought to meet you.”

I kept very still. I’ve never known a god taking an active interest in someone’s life to be anything but trouble. “So are there other gods visiting the other three? Is Ka’sara getting a dream-visit from your god of smart-asses?”

“Pots and kettles. Your three new friends all have powerfully warded dreams. Not an impediment, of course, but a strong indication they don’t want to talk. And it’d take a delicate touch to get in without damaging their minds.” She took a sip of her tea. “A sensible precaution for Ka’sara and Serrax, of course, there are predators that stalk in dreams where they come from. You might wish to ask your spider priestess why she’s so intent on keeping divine attention out of her dreams, though.”

Thyrenna, warding her dreams? To keep out what? A fascinating question. “So we’ve met now. May I wake up?”

Avei’s eyes glittered with amusement. “I thought I might offer you some assistance, so long as you’re here.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know a way I could get home?”

“Not one that could be opened without making a more permanent bridge, and I’d much rather keep our planes isolated from each other. Your gods are more focused than we are, less limited in their ability to take direct action. Letting Lolth or Cyric loose out here would be something of a disaster.” She held a hand out towards me, and in her palm rested a mote of glimmering gold. I had the distinct impression of feathers as I looked at it. “No, I thought I’d offer you my blessing. A little piece of connection.”

I didn’t reach out to take it. “I can’t serve as your champion, I’ve got to go home.”

She snorted. “We don’t know each other that well, yet, no. This is a gift, given freely, with no expectation of being repaid.” The fragment rose and circled, lazily, above her palm. “I offer it because I think you and I may grow to like each other as we get to know each other, and because I think you will find a way to do good with it.”

I looked up from the shimmering light into her eyes, large and dark and deep, and caught just a flicker of the _presence_ that had compressed itself into the shape of a human woman so I could talk to it. Flickers of drive, fragments of emotion, the merest edges of her being spun me around like a whirlpool, and somehow out of the movements of a vast cosmic engine beyond the limits of mortal comprehension I picked a strong scent of good faith. I don’t know if it was the dream-fuge or her presence but I reached out and took her hand, and the light flowed from her into me. Just a trickle, and its warmth drained away quickly as it passed into my aura until I parked it firmly in an isolated place away from my own magic, where it glowed serenely in my mind’s eye. Weakened but unbowed.

The goddess smiled, then. Gone was the sense of divinity I had before, and she could have been an ordinary mortal woman again. “You’ll want to read up on the Circles of Interaction when you wake up, especially if you’re going to try and use two schools.” I tried to ask another question, but she slipped away, her hand on mine lingering a moment longer. _Good luck, little sister_ floated through my mind, half-heard, half-felt, as I ascended towards wakefulness.

*** _Ka’sara_ ***

A nondetection spell is tremendously simple in concept and incredibly tedious to actually build; in theory all you need to do is wire the target’s aura into their surroundings so any kind of sympathetic link to them is spread across a wide area, effectively returning to the caster an image of the area without the target actually in it. In practice, though, first you need to calibrate for a range of parameters and set the spell up to adjust for changes in the wider area so you can move around without distorting the effect, then you need to set the area covered to shift size and shape at random so the person scrying can’t just go for the center of the spell, and _then_ you need to set the magical parameters to fluctuate so they can’t just look for the spot that’s the exact average of its surroundings. A determined tracker will still be able to place you within a rough area, but it’ll prevent them from finding out anything more detailed. 

I’m a fast worker, but not fast enough to get us all under cover before that archmage traced us here, so I fogged our landing site. A teleport trace should show that we’d landed simultaneously everywhere in the city, which either meant we’d blocked it or botched the teleport and scattered particulate matter over the whole place. Hopefully that’d give the Arachne pause before jumping in and looking for us individually, which would give me time to set up the nondetection spells on us.

The girl in pink had turned out to be Lady Marianne Calverat, younger daughter of some sort of minor local nobility, and an aspiring arcanist hereself; she proved quite an amenable assistant. As the others went to bed and the house servants she’d been playing cards with dispersed to other duties (or to lurk in the background watching us without appearing to, in the case of the kitchen maid) I set to work translating the nondetection formula to account for the local background magic, and she set to work copying out bits and pieces of it as I handed it to her. In the space of about two hours we were left with an elaborate construct of magically-treated inks stretched across four sheets of magically-treated paper, and then I triggered it and it went up with a _whoosh_ of blue-white fire, leaving no mark or trace on the countertop.

Lady Marianne begged off to go to sleep herself; the adrenaline (and the coffee, to be honest) precluded such activities for me, so when Arunae wandered groggily back into the kitchen and sat down at around four the next morning I was busy etching spell formulae into my staff.

“You’re up early.”

She watched me for a minute, not replying, then shook herself. “Did you go to sleep at all?”

“Nope. Too much coffee. Scrying defenses are up and I’ve got a few more tricks ready here.” I waggled my staff for emphasis.

“Coffee?”

“What, you don’t have coffee where you come from? Stimulant, usually served as drink, infusion of roasted and ground beans? Like tea, only stronger?”

“No.” We lapsed into silence. I finished the shielding spell, left two inches bare for teleportation formulae I hadn’t quite worked out yet, reconsidered, and started the structure of a complex detection spell four inches above the shielding spell. Arunae shifted in her seat. “I had a visit from a goddess last night.”

I snorted and kept working, then looked up to find her staring at me incredulously. “What? Your religious experiences are your own business.”

“Do gods not poke their noses into things to meddle where you come from?”

I shook my head and tried not to sound condescending. “‘Gods’ are the constructs of mortal societies, they’re not discrete entities with a will and a motivation that run around poking their noses into our business.”

She snorted back. “Your world sounds like a great place to live, with no immeasurably powerful divine beings throwing their weight around.”

I blinked. “Wait, you’re _serious_? Your world’s _gods_ exist as physical entities that go around screwing with people?”

“Sure. Some more than others. And apparently this one’s do too.” She frowned. “And give advice on magic, apparently. Have you ever heard the phrase ‘circles of interaction’?”

I eyed her warily. “So is your goddess...talking...to you...now?”

“Don’t be silly.” She frowned, and I felt a momentary surge in one of the background magical fields I couldn’t access, then a faint globe of golden light grew from nothing into being above her palm. “She said she’d give me a ‘blessing’, and when I woke up I could do this. I had to compartmentalize the connection in my aura carefully since arcane magic seems to erode it somehow.”

I prodded the globe with a fingertip, it was solid as a rock. “Fascinating.” I hit it with a spark of magic, a tiny fragment of energy too small to even be called a spell, and the globe fizzled and faded. Arunae winced, and glared at me. “That looked a lot like what the Scyllithene priestess did down that hole earlier.”

“It does, doesn’t it?”

I shook myself, mind still reeling from the revelations of divine intervention. “Well. Hopefully any more gods we run into will be that friendly.”

“I wouldn’t count on it.” Arunae looked more awake now, her bleary expression had gone grim. “Gods do things for their own purposes, the welfare of individual pawns on the gameboard isn’t a big concern for them.” She looked around the kitchen. “Any more of that ‘coffee’ stuff lying about?”


End file.
